Cantabile 2.0

A colleague of mine just released Cantabile 2.0. If you are interested in Virtual Studio Technology Instruments (VST) you should check it out.

VST aside, this thing is a kick ass example of a custom built, high performance, Ribbon based UI

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Patrick O'Brian Mapping Project GUI Changes

I have become slightly stalled on the Surgeon's Mate. The course across the Atlantic is not completely obvious and I struggling to get past some contradictory evidence. I will get there eventually.

So as a distraction I have spent a bit of time improving some things that have annoyed me.

• Moved all the map data into a MySQL database. I should have done this a long time ago.
• Exposing my map data as json objects rather than XML (thanks to my new DB) means faster page load times.
• I have added a Toggle button to the toolbar which hides/shows the header for the map page. More map and less superfluous GUI is good.
• Previously when clicking on thumbnail images in infoWindows opened a separate page, this has been changed to a javascript lightbox to highlight the larger image (and no page reloads)
• I have created a series of static pages based on each map note. This exposes all the content on the site to search engines and also provides a low bandwidth/no javascript experience for users.

Hope you like the changes, I should really get back to Surgeon's Mate (and play less Broken Picture Telephone)

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Internet Explorer 8 Homepage needs some work.

I felt like the IE8 Homepage was a bit incoherent and not exactly selling me on the product.

In the super competitive browser market I was expecting a short, high impact set of convincing arguments for IE8. This PDF download message when I clicked "Why you should download Internet Explorer 8", made me laugh out loud.

Compare this with the Chrome Homepage. It's all about the browser.

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Electoral College Screensaver 1.4

Because I needed to splice my install directory into the system path to implicitly link to the OgreMain DLL and I figured that NSIS (my install packager of choice) would either provide the functionality natively, or have some code I could use to do this. The later was true and I found some horrible NSIS assemlbyish code to do what I wanted. It came from the NSIS wiki and I felt like I could rely on it.

Sometime after I put up my first version, I discovered that in very rare cases, this code would erase the system path rather than appending to it. It took me some time to discover that the bug occured when a maximum string length in NSIS was exceeded. So the solution was to rebuild the NSIS compiler with a longer maximum string length and for those cases were that maximum was exceeded, handle the error rather than erasing the path.

I have since added a warning to the NSIS wiki, but might be checking out Inno installer for my next project

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Electoral College Screensaver 1.3

Added support for election day morning. Previously I handled polling data for every state, but on election day, obviously everything will be up in the air and I will be using actual voting data instead of the polls on Electoral Vote. As the results come in on election day I will update my XML in real time.

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